


Runaway

by Virodeil



Series: Caught Is Caught Is Cuddled [8]
Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Thor Movies, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Unexpected Family Relations
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-10-25 02:22:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20716505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Virodeil/pseuds/Virodeil
Summary: Loki hadnotmeant to let a band of cocksure Asgardians loose in a hostile land of hostile giant brutes. He hadnotmeant to antagonise the barbaric blue monsters, either. Then again, he hadnever, ever, everexpected his skin to turn blue in the middle of the unexpected battle that ensued, nor what happened afterwards.He had wanted to instigate a droplet of problem in Thor’s coronation; now he got a flood of it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Eh. I know what you'd say. "This again? When there are still so many unfinished fics you put out there? I'd prefer that you update XXX to tinkering with yet another new idea." Well, but my muse wouldn't budge, and this is actually an old supposed-to-be-one-shot that I never got the drive to finish but did wish to finish, and I thought you could enjoy what's already written with me…. It's one of my most boring fics, truth be told, but it begged to be written, so I complied.

“Loki! Come!”

Female. Frantic. Desperate. – But how can I respond to her, help her? I am frantic, myself. Desperate, even. I have my own problem, here!

A blue one. A blue hue that _keeps spreading_, with white markings that _keep spreading_, on _my own skin_, alongside an additional awareness that is somehow _familiar_.

I stab down with the dagger: again, again, again, again. But the frost giant that keeps my forearm captive still _doesn’t let go_, and doesn’t talk either, just grunting with pain. – Serves it right, cursing me like this!

I am the one who relents, in no time at all it seems. Perhaps Thor is right: I am a weakling. I simply _cannot stand_ listening to prolonged, senseless pain, especially when I am the one who causes it.

I cannot stand looking at my own _changed_ skin, either.

“Let me go!” I yell at last. And how glad I am that Thor’s friends have been separated far away from me by the tides of the – very, very askew – battle. None of them would hear how like a sob my childish plea sounds and report it to my brother.

Something is pressed against the palm of the same hand, then: roughly disk-like, colder than my captor’s vise-like grip, and it _sucks_ something from within me, _layers_ of it that I now realise _don’t belong to me_.

A tiny ward sapper, on the hand of a giant brute of a monster.

A _skin changer_, even, if there were even such a thing in the universe, for I can feel my physical shape _shifting_ – stretching, contorting, squirming, warping, twisting – from the inside out, alongside all the _restrictions_ – yes, I know it now, I know it now, I know it _now_ – peeling off of my metaphysical self.

_Exquisitely_ discomfitting.

Agonisingly freeing, as well, and I wail my pain, my hurt, my anger, my confusion, my _freedom_ out to the sky – so dim, so alien, so many stars – above this realm of monsters.

Faintly, I realise that my voice changes ever so slightly, from the timbre I’ve known all my life to… _something_; something that is quickly swallowed up by a bigger roar from far away, from a voice that my primal brain seems to recognise as incongruously _safe_.

And then a pair of arms lift me up as though I were a flour sack or a small child, and the roar is joined by many more from all round us.

I feel like a trophy won in a competition.

With that unpleasant thought in mind, also with the added reminder that I am now _in Jötunheim_, I try to banish the lingering pain, discomfiture and confusion, to continue the fight. I blink my eyes open, then blink, blink, blink, blink again.

Not because my eyes refuse to focus, no, no, no. I am just… startled.

The sky is _bright_; not as bright as that above Asgard, but not at all as dim as what I beheld before the disastrous battle against that stubborn jötun’s grip.

And I am _upheld on a pair of arms_, while my upholder and those round it are screaming their… anger? Jubilation? Grief? Ecstacy?… to the heavens.

And then, as I am _at long last_ lowered back down, the vista of the alien sky is replaced by a pair of glowing, red eyes.

Before I can struggle, before I can scream my defiance, before I can even comprehend the sheer obsurdity of the turn of events, the arms that are still holding me shift, and my face is pressed flush against skin that should be deathly cold to the touch, against a neck with taut muscles.

Commands are barked out, reverberating round me, spoken in a language untranslatable by Allspeak. And then my captor _moves_.

The shock takes a long, long, long time to fade. Reality and useless struggling follow right afterward.

I wanted to put a small disruption on Thor’s ill-advised coronation, by egging on the jötnar to send… representatives… to sneak into Asgard. And the oaf and his band of idiots _invaded_ Jötunheim in retaliation.

I wanted to keep the impromptu audience between us and Laufey short and non-inflamatory. _But_ Thor ruined it _thoroughly_ by his inability to take in a very, very cheap piece of mockery.

I wanted just to get back to Asgard, _by whatever means necessary_. And now, instead, not only losing the battle in a very, very peculiar way, it seems that I will _never_ return there.

I want to keep awake, to keep struggling, to keep fighting, but my new awareness and senses wreak havoc with my will and my sense of safety. It keeps saying that I am safe, that I am in familiar territory, that I am supposed to succumb into sleep because a gentle hand is rubbing the back of my neck – up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down….

In seemingly forever and no time at all, my sensible half loses the battle.


	2. Chapter 2

I regain consciousness surrounded by semi-squishy softness.

Whatever is around me, it is no longer an open space outdoors, I sense that much, at first. It is totally silent, at that, though not in an immediately threatening manner. – No breathing, no heartbeat, no shifting, no rustling, no tapping. There are only the sounds of a living being that I myself make, which feel so _loud_ in this quietude. Dare I risk open my eyes for a visual check? Or do I try to gauge the situation magically first? My current surrounding does not seem hostile, so maybe….

I pool my seiðr together, ready to be used, and fight not to frown with how sluggish it feels in the meantime. Next, I twitch my fingertips, feeling around the semi-squishy surface; also whatever that seems to cover me up to the chin, come to think of it again.

I am in a… bed? Or maybe a pile of furs covered by linens? But who put me here? Last I knew, I had been captured by a blood-thirsty jötun _among many_, or so it sounded. Surely those brutes would not keep their captured enemy in such a cosy setting like this? Surely their prison cells are not this well-furnished? Surely their prisoners are not this well-treated?

I crack my eyes open a sliver. Then, meeting no hostile reaction, I open them all the way.

The view that greets me is that of an expanse of ice sheet, looking worn with age though strangely untouched. Soft red light is reflected evenly on the ice sheet, friendly to my recovering sight.

Admitedly, it also immediately sparks the curiosity of my awakening mind, as it makes the ambience look rather exotic, different from all other places that I have ever visited or been kept in.

I am lying on my back, so the ice sheet must be the ceiling of wherever I am, and the red light must come from somewhere nearby. The surface that hosts my body for the time being makes me think of a well-equipped fur bed instead of a hasty and/or sparse nest of furs, so this is almost definitely not a prison cell, as I have found myself in during some of the more disastrous adventures Thor instigated.

Except, if those uncivilised monsters have a special prison cell for enemy royalty….

There is only one way to test this hypothesis, given the fact that, however awake I am right now, my seiðr remains sluggish and unfocused. My physical muscles do not fair much better than my magical ones, but at least they do _work_, and I manage to shift myself into an upright seated position.

Unfortunately, then I realise that I am naked under the blanket, still blue and white-marked to boot.

My heart, already pounding from the simple feat of getting up, now feels like it wishes to escape my ribcage.

I still look pretty much like a jötun – a _monster_. Is this a curse? Did that frost giant who put the ward sapper on me slip in the curse in-between stripping me off all foreign things that I didn’t even realise were atached to me? Is it why I feel so roundly sluggish? Is this curse powered by my own seiðr?

Well, no matter. I will be able to look into this problem better when I regain my full use of seiðr and return to safety. Now I just have to achieve both, starting with fashioning some clothing and finding some weaponisable thing for myself.

Easier said than done, though. A cursory look reveals that I am situated in a tiny room – more a big cupboard or the inside of my walk-in wardrobe at home, really – which is walled on two sides by opaque ice and the other two some grey stone. The furniture is equally minimalistic: just this surprisingly comfortable nest of fur, soft fabric, equally soft leather and quite a few cushions. No chains as in the prison cells that I know of, and no medical tools either as in an infirmary setting.

In short, nothing for me to use as anything but as it is intended, except maybe for the smallest, lightest blanket that I am presently draping over myself like a cloak.

A much more in-depth look does not reveal anything new – not even a door or a window, and now I am wondering why I am not short of breath yet from lack of circulated air.

And the lack of a visible, viable exit adds a new problem to the pile, namely the fast impinging claustrophobia.

Damn. Oh, Norns, I just want to _go home_.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the ride. Please tell me what you thought of it? (Honesty would be highly appreciated, for my development as a writer, as a non-native English speaker, and as a person. ☺)


End file.
